With three small children to raise in a dirt-poor village in eastern India’s Bihar state, farm labourer Renu Devi is an unsung rural supermom who shuttles between home and field every day. But the demure 30-year-old mother does not forget to bring her children to the biannual Vitamin A rounds in Bagwanpur Rati, one of the villages in Vaishali district of Bihar. This is because Vitamin A deficiency is a major...

When French Jesuit priest and passionate agriculturist Henri de Laulanie developed the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method of cultivation for Madagascar’s poor farmers in the 1980s, he probably had no idea that millions of farmers elsewhere in the world would one day benefit from it as well. Here in India, one of the 40 countries where SRI is now in use, poor tillers of the land are even helping propagate...

After vegetables, now milk will also pinch consumers, as Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation, which markets dairy products under the brand Amul, on Tuesday announced a pan-India hike in milk prices by up to Rs 2 a litre. "We have increased prices of our various brands by Re 1 to Rs 1, which will come in to effect from December 30 in Gujarat and Delhi and by January 3 in other...

After sugar mills in Uttar Pradesh, it’s now the turn of jute mills in West Bengal to reel under shortage of labour. This has forced many jute mills to reduce their production hours and go for production cuts. The 52 working jute mills in West Bengal employ around 400,000 workers and the labour shortfall is about 30 per cent. “The workers are more interested in getting engaged in different government schemes like...

CPI(M) will organise a two-day state level adivasi conference at Malbazar in Jalpaiguri district from December 28. But adivasis under the aegis of Adivasi Vikas Parishad have given a call for a 2-day bandh coinciding with the conference. John Berla, president of Adivasi Vikas Parishad, told newsmen here yesterday that the CPI(M) had not given attention to the plight of tea garden labourers, distribution of patta to tribals, proving education facilities in...